Dear Nancy,
I agree with Tom regarding 'themes'. The need to
develop themes, generally much to early in the
analysis of data, typicially represents the
insecurities of the researcher to cope with a mountain
of data and less to do with finding 'generalities'
across interviews.
My advice would be to put 'themes' very much on the
back burner until very late in the analysis process
and, instead, proceed with the team analyses of
individual interviews using separate teams for both
the lived life and told story, as per the biog narr
method.
The analysis of these two parts can then be compared
for consistency and/or contrasts. Later, much later,
the individual case's analyses can be compared across
cases, sometimes arriving at 'themes', sometimes not.
Cheers,
Kip
--- Tom Wengraf <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> IF ANYBODY ELSE ON THE BNIM LIST HAS ANY FURTHER
> THOUGHTS, PLEASE WRITE TO
> NANCY (COPY TO BNIM LIST PREFERABLY) DIRECT.
>
>
>
>
>
> Dear Nancy,
>
>
>
> Thanks for your questions. Since they raise issues
> of a more general
> interest, I’m taking the liberty of circulating your
> email with my response
> (this email) to members of the BNIM list. They may
> have other and different
> responses, and may write to you directly with them.
>
>
>
> The main issue is that I am not clear what it is
> about “life experiences of
> survivors of child sexual abuse who go on to develop
> obsessive-compulsive
> difficulties” that you wish to describe or explain.
> The precise nature of
> the descriptions or explanations or both you would
> like to generate is not
> clear.
>
>
>
> I’m also not clear about what you mean by a
> “(common) themes analysis” as a
> methodology of interpretation. You might be
> referring to what BNIM refers to
> as a ‘thematic field analysis’ but you might be
> referring to the abstraction
> of atomistic ‘themes’ from on e transcript and
> looking to find the same set
> of themes in other transcripts.
>
>
>
> Given that I don’t have a clear idea of what you
> mean by a “themes
> analysis”, several of your questions I have for the
> moment to leave
> unanswered.
>
>
>
> I hope nonetheless that my email is helpful. It
> sounds as if you have rich
> material on your core case. Congratulations!
>
>
>
> Best wishes
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: (pg) Nancy Robson-Mills
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 04 March 2007 10:42
> To: tom wengraf
> Subject: Questions related to research using the
> BNIM method
>
>
>
> Hi Tom
>
>
>
> My name is Nancy and I'm a third year trainee on the
> Plymouth clinical
> psychology training course. I was wondering if you
> would mind me asking you
> a few questions related to my research?
>
>
>
> I am using the BNIM method to explore the life
> experiences of survivors of
> childhood sexual abuse who go on to develop
> obessional compulsive
> difficulties and hope to be able to draw connections
> between life
> experiences and OCD.
>
>
>
> I have conducted three interviews. All three women
> have provided rich
> information but one interview in particular (S) is
> very rich and detailed. I
> interviewed S over a number of weeks and there is in
> total seven hours of
> interview material (including lots of rich
> narratives). The other two
> interviews are approx 3 and 4 hours long. I am
> thinking about just doing a
> full analysis on S's interview, this is for two
> main reasons 1) S’s
> interview seems to provide an exemplar 2) time
> constraints involved- I feel
> it will take a long time to do the full analysis on
> all three interviews).
>
>
>
> I plan to do the full analysis with just S's
> interview and then draw on the
> other two….
>
>
>
>
>
> Yes: if the\ core case is well-chosen and dealt with
> fully, then other cases
> can be treated as satellite cases and interpreted
> less fully.
>
>
>
> in a common theme analysis. Do you think it's ok to
> do this?
>
>
>
>
>
> I’m not sure of what you mean by “a common theme
> analysis”, so I can’t
> comment. However, ‘theme analysis’ can be a formal
> enumeration of a set of
> ‘textual themes’ or it can be an attempt (as in BNIM
> interpretation) to get
> at the historically-situated ‘experiencing subject’
> who tells the story. The
> longer version of the “Guide to BNIM” discusses this
> in a number of places,
> particularly when it explains how we now talk of the
> interpretative study of
> the “telling of the told story” and not (as we did
> until recently) just of
> the interpretive study of the “told story”.
>
>
>
> Do you think I need to do a TSS for the two other
> interviews if I am only
> using this data in a themes analysis?
>
>
>
> As above. What do you mean by a “themes analysis”?
> Some sort of study of the
> significance of the sequence of topics is pretty
> inherent to BNIM. It may be
> that for your purpose of doing a “themes analysis”,
> you may need either no
> TSS or a very broad-brush one.
>
>
>
>
>
> Would you recommend looking for commonalities
> between he interviews in
> another way?
>
>
>
> When you compare interviews (or historically-located
> subjectivities), you
> don’t have to only look for “commonalities”, the
> bugbear of traditional
> Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss) is the rush to
> ignore differences. In
> the “Short Guide to BNIM”, I argue for the
> importance of looking both for
> commonalities and for particularities in what I call
> ‘GPT’ (grounded
> generalizing and particularizing theory’, theory
> that accounts both for the
> commonalities and for the particularities of the
> case being studied.
>
>
>
> Again, I would need more detail on what you mean by
> “a
=== message truncated ===
Dr Kip Jones
Reader in Qualitative Social Science
Centre for Qualitative Research
Institute of Health & Community Studies
Bournemouth University United Kingdom
*************************
Website: www.kipworld.net
*****************************************
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